Ping Pals

Exploring new frontiers of worthlessness.

Yo, yo, yo, buddy, I gotcha some good deals on a fifth car wheel, whaddaya say? Howsabout a six-button mouse for your computer? It's got six buttons, yo! That's better than two! Well, would you be interested in Ping Pals for Nintendo DS -- just thirty bucks, man! Hey, wassamatta with you? Come back here!

That's Ping Pals for you; it does everything your Nintendo DS can already do with Pictochat built-in, with dubious "improvements" tacked on. The hook is that you can earn money and prizes while chatting, to better kit out your avatar, which isn't such a bad idea in and of itself. After all, customization and personalization are big deals these days -- companies do a brisk business in ringtones, wallpaper, and screensavers for cellular phones, all so the user can make his or her device unique.

The key difference between Ping Pals and that phenomenon, though, is that installing a new ringtone won't degrade the performance of the phone. With scant else on the screen but the doodle area and touch keypad, Pictochat can afford to make both vital areas of the interface spacious. You can actually draw something recognizable in that space, and "type" faster with less risk of error due to the good-sized virtual keyboard. But Ping Pals, with its avatars, colorful buttons, and interface to the rest of the "game" crowding the screen, offers considerably less space to do what you want to do. It's a chat program at heart, but one where it's barely possible to chat.

The interface also suffers from the busy screen: you get one line weight instead of Pictochat's two, there's no way to erase everything at once, and the eraser button itself is hidden behind the pencil key. (For that matter, why do you need a pencil key, given that the doodle area and keypads are in separate spaces? Pictochat enforces no such distinction, but you'll have to manually switch between typing and drawing in Ping Pals for no explainable reason.)

If you can put up with all of that, Ping Pals still doesn't offer many enticements over plain-vanilla Pictochat. There are "secret words" which, if typed, bestow bonus coins to use in the shop -- but with around 200,000 commonly used words in the English language, I was less than interested in tracking them down. You can play a couple of multiplayer games, but they're so braindead that you might as well not bother: the Hot Potato game, for instance, asks each player to type in a word to pass the potato along. This might be fun if the word was randomly generated, but it's "pass" every single time. Did I miss something?

Ping Pals also has the dubious ability to play in single-player mode. You can "talk" to AI chatbots, in a manner of speaking, though their routines are so thin that one such CPU character left the room in a huff after not understanding anything I was typing. What did I say that was so difficult to comprehend? "Wow!" and "Really?" (Though frankly, even if the AI was up to par, it would take something pretty impressive to get me to spend my time talking to a computer.)

If you're going to duplicate the basic functionality of a system and charge money for it, it's necessary to do a hell of a lot better a job than Ping Pals does. If it existed on its own, it would be mediocre, but as it stands it's completely without value. This is less a game to be played than buried in a landfill in the desert.